retired_mandyrae30

FM lacks proper international management realism, mainly due to not enough players retained in the 'small', 'medium' or 'large' databases when starting a new game. Only the main nations are able to be managed, no San Marino, many Asian & African nations, all depending on which leagues you choose. The removal of the 'huge' database option in FM2007 and FM2008 made this a problem. This is a major issue to those who wish to manage lesser reputation nations in the game.

At present, in order to manage one of the lesser reputation nations, the user needs to choose to the 'retain all players from...' option at the start of the game, or wait for the game to generate Freds to a sufficient amount (150 I believe) to make a national team playable.

IMO, retaining players from any nation can unbalance a game and slows down the progressing. Also I don't necessarily want to choose at the start of the game a nation or nations to manage as I normally play over 30 to 40 year career games and I cannot plan my in-game destiny, there needs to be another solution.

Why can't all national teams be playable without increasing the size of the original game database?

How can this be done:-

FM2007 introduced the ability of club managers to offer contracts to their grey players. Technically a user can manage a team newly promoted into the lowest possible tier, who normally get promoted full of greys or with a limited amount of 'active' players. The game soon generates Freds in the reserves or youth setups as a consequence of the ability to manage a new team.

Why can't this same principle be applied to national teams whereby:
- all nations are playable, based the existing database size principles
- when a user accepts a position as manger of a ‘new’ nation the game automatically generates Freds at clubs in the nation’s domestic league setup to recognise the active nature of the national team
- where there are insufficient players to call up for international duty the national team manager has the ability to call-up a grey player, this then makes them 'active' following the same principle of the club situation.
- this then allows those newly active players to join clubs and improve where possible

I am missing the huge database, I know that SI said that there were reasons for removing this, however another solution needs to be found to allow increased International management without the user merely loading up all leagues and retaining all players which is not going to provide reasonable game processing speeds. Perhaps the above points can work to allow more nations to be managed.

Any thoughts?

retired_AnnRN3473

cant you do the 'load all players from a certain nation' thing anyway?

retired_2symonds

It's an interesting thought and I agree with having the option to manage any international team from any point in your game. I think the limit (if it's 150 or whatever) is there so there are more than enough players for you to be able to choose from for a full team and U21s.

I would say that is probably the best solution, although I've no idea if there are any technical or game balancing issues with that. Obviously you could go around adding yourself as loads of smaller nations and have loads of new players generated for those nations. Not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing to be honest, but it might cause issues.

Not sure if that could be exploited either. There might be a situation where you could do that with one of the bigger nations and generate good quality players for them then snap them up for your club or something like that. Not sure I like the idea.

That said, I think it's something we should definitely try and improve on in the future. I've had some cracking games in the past where I've managed San Marino. Now, I just need to convince people to get their club leaugue added to the game

retired_mandyrae30

You could load all players from however like I said I don't start the game with a pre-defined career path. Also retaining a significant part of the database has a major affect on the spped of the processing, making it unbearably slow.

retired_mandyrae30

Cheers Ter :thup:

In terms of the calling up greys issue, I don't anticipate that working with nations where there are (for instance) 150 already active players in the database, I would be used merely to bring the number upto the minimum allowed to make the nation playable under the present format.

Neb

Thats a cracking idea!

I like international management, but I also prefer LLM. Its difficult to do both as only the big national teams are playable. This would certainly fix that issue.

:thup:

retired_2symonds

Yeah, but FM is so open ended it's sometimes hard to predict how these things will balance out in the future. You would also have the issue with teams like Germany who have grey players in the national team for licensing reasons.

retired_mandyrae30

I won't apply to Germany then! Bloody licensing!

Ter, I am already enjoying my new career game, I have not used the retain all players from option, but I would love to manage San Marino (or another crap nation) at some point, but even with the Italian league loaded, they are unlikely to become playable. Surely a solution must be found so FM International management can be enhanced and made more enjoyable.

retired_mandyrae30

Ah, I forgot to say that it would make no difference with Germany as the game already has plenty of players in the game database as they are not playable for the licensing reasons.

In terms of how things would balance out in the future, surely it is worth developing and a test by the SI team to ascertain how it would affect a game.